Spider monkeys seek out fruit with alcohol, finds research into human love of drinking

A new study posits that our ancestors’ search for high-calorie foods could be responsible for our taste for alcohol, Andy Gregory reports

Spider monkeys have been found to seek out fruits which have fermented (Orlando Sierra/AFP via Getty Images)

Spider monkeys routinely seek out fruit ripe enough to contain alcohol, a new study suggests, lending weight to a theory that humans’ enthusiasm for drinking was inherited from our biological ancestors.

According to the “drunken monkey” hypothesis, proposed in 2014 by Berkeley biologist Professor Robert Dudley, our attraction to alcohol dates back millions of years to when primates discovered that the smell of ethanol led them to ripe, fermenting and nutritious fruit.

But while his theory was based on knowledge that some fruits eaten by primates have an alcohol content of up to 7 per cent, he was unable to provide evidence on whether monkeys and apes actually sought out fermented fruits or digested the alcohol.